Education Through Friendship: One Man’s Story (Part 3)
Parts 1 and 2 of this series describe the origin of a group of teenage friends in Pittsburgh (PA) in the late-1940s. It is also a story of my education outside of schools I attended in living a full life with people I loved.
Deciding to Stay Together
The idea of a group of close friends who worked at staying together did not emerge among us until after college when many of us left Pittsburgh to attend graduate school, work in other cities or serve in the U.S. military. While we had already begun annual New Year’s Eve parties in the early ‘50s while in college (much food, little liquor and awfully amateurish but hilarious entertainment staged by ourselves with the obligatory game of charades after midnight), the notion of a cohesive group beyond annual parties had not taken hold.
By the early 1960s, most of have us had been married a few years.* Children arrived. We were building careers. Some of us lived in Cleveland and Youngstown (OH) and Elizabeth (NJ). A few of us in Pittsburgh and Cleveland got together to establish a book discussion group. As to who would join, a core of seven couples who had kept in touch by phone, letter, visits, and being at each other’s weddings became the book club (Yus, Sam, Dave, and I along with our wives were among those founding couples).
We had no name. No president, dues, or business meetings. No rules save those agreed upon by consensus. Intellectual and social interests had merged.
Once the book club formed and met monthly, even traveling to Barbara and Larry’s home in Cleveland on a few occasions, the idea and its existence grabbed our imaginations. We began to pride ourselves in sticking together even though our careers diverged, a few of us lived out of town, and each of us had created other networks of acquaintances and friends at work, in schools our children CONTINUE READING: Education Through Friendship: One Man’s Story (Part 3) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
